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Once upon a time Reddit was a link aggregator. You would post a link and the author would get credit. You could save the link without Reddit. But Reddit is mov

Once upon a time Reddit was a link aggregator. You would post a link and the author would get credit. You could save the link without Reddit. But Reddit is moving towards first party content. Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support but many communities disallow external content. Requiring a reupload or a screenshot. This not only removes the link to the actual creator but is also a nightmare for usability, especially for disabled people where a photo may be less accessible than raw text with their browser styling. Unfortunately this is just what the web has come to. Not only just the web. I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Or is it just that people don't know where to find the links? This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app. Of course the screenshot shortcut is always consistent.

criley2 5y ago
>I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular Tracking. Most people just assume that if you share a real link to a product, fourteen different quasi-legal shady third-party advertising profile aggregators will have that saved and loaded into your AdWords rotation and ready for Alexa to Bing you with within seconds. I get that it's more complicated than that, and that E2E chat mitigates (but doesn't eliminate) advertising tracking risk, but a link is just so easy to track, and tracking is so ingrained into our digital experience, that it's just nice to share something and break the tracking while you're at it
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Most people? Most people don’t know what AdWords is. Most people don’t think much of tracking if at all outside of when they are prompted about it. Or the one or two minor anecdotes they have of (sometimes coincidentally) seeing the same sort of ad on Amazon or Facebook.
  - criley2 5y ago
    ?? I think you're absolutely wrong here. My boomer parents who can't setup a Smart TV and played blu-rays in standard definition for years absolutely know that Google and Amazon are tracking everything they do and have reached out to me on several occasions about reducing how much data Big Tech gets from them. I think you're totally out of touch with the general populace if you think average users don't keenly feel the spying gaze of big tech. My 92 year old grandfather moved to iOS two years ago, at age 90, to reduce how much Google got from him. Dude doesn't know a damn thing about computers, but he knows Google is spying. I think it's valid to suggest that people don't trade links to reduce spying.
    - ses1984 5y ago
      Here's my anecdote to counter your anecdote. When I try to explain stuff like this to my family members, they barely humor me. Their eyes glaze over. They think I'm crazy. My sister-in-law works in marketing so she's kind of aware of it but has made zero changes to her behavior. Other friends tell me they get more benefit than cost and accept it.
      - criley2 5y ago
        Well here's some data to counter the anecdotes: - 80%+ of Americans agree that there needs to be Data Privacy legislation controlling big tech https://epic.org/privacy/survey/ https://epic.org/privacy/survey/ - Americans are rather in favor of breaking up big tech and popular anti-trust action continues https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/1/dfp_vox_tech_polling.pdf https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/1/dfp_vox_tec... - Apple has pivoted their iPhone advertising strategy to promote privacy against Big Tech (lol) as their #1 selling point
        avereveard 5y ago
        > This poll was conducted between April 16-April 19, 2021 among a sample of 1992 Registered Voters 80% on an online positive-assertive survey ran on population that small it's a completely bogus statistic. heck I can't even fathom how people would cite this, the methodological note is three lines, doesn't tell how the participants were selected, say votes were weighted but doesn't say the weights nor the weighted parameters; they have like 72 pages of demographics, probably a couple person for each, and say the error margin is 2%
willis936 5y ago
In the case of person-to-person: links decay but screenshots do not. A screenshot is a record that I know doesn't have any trackers and won't one day disappear. It's the information that I want to send and nothing more.
- rolandog 5y ago
  > It's the information that I want to send and nothing more. In some cases, it is... But I think, most times, it's the equivalent of getting something you ordered online, encased in a large blob of jello. You can look at it, but everyone is going to have a hard time interacting with it.
- Arrath 5y ago
  The persistence of a screenshot (or any image) depends entirely on the hosting platform, though. How many image hosts have gone down over the years, leaving niche forums with broken image links in the middle of otherwise very useful posts? Is there any guarantee that even reddit will keep around image posts uploaded to its own servers, forever?
  - willis936 5y ago
    Person-to-person means not hosted by anyone. Sending a png screenshot over sms or imessage or signal, etc. means the image is bytes on a personal device. How the other person manages their data is their own business.
    - Arrath 5y ago
      Fair point, I could have sworn your comment didn't say person-to-person when I first replied. I'll give you that point. Personally, I still prefer links as I find them easier to sort and categorize in my bookmark library, or indeed take screenshots of the linked content if I deem it worth of it. As it is with images, I don't really bother to sort them so I have them scattered all over. In the folder where my SMS app saves images, in the folder where whatsapp saves images, in the case of discord I rarely explicitly download and save the images outside the app, etc. Opening a link I receive opens the link in one program, my default browser, from where I can manage the link as I see fit. All these different apps have their own built in image viewers, save locations, or layers between the message and the content/image, making it much more of a hassle to manage that image as compared to a plain link.
pjc50 5y ago
> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere Spam. The target site may be spammy: lots of adverts, popup/unders, taboola "chumboxes" etc. Or, if a site can make money from inbound link traffic, there's an incentive for its owners to spam links in subreddits to drive traffic to themselves. > This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app Definitely another problem, walled gardens that you can't link into as well as out of.
- ProtoAES256 5y ago
  Apart from spam, scams too. Fake login pages, to the tech-illeterate are virtually indistinguishable from the real site.
- rualca 5y ago
  > Spam. This excuse doesn't really stick as reddit moderates content both by their user base but also by subreddit mods and reddit admins. I'd say that this is all to do with the goal of turning reddit into a walled garden.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    It absolutely sticks. Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for. The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress. The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.
    - rualca 5y ago
      > Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for. Moderating a subreddit is not a job. Moderators are regular users from the community who are picked to have a say in how the community is regulated. > The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress. Good to see that you're agreeing with me, unless you believe that mods fixing a problem without resorting to a walled garden is somehow a counterexample. > The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first. You're needlessly overgeneralizing. Using an automated filter that's prone to false positives is not a problem at all, or refutes the point I made. In fact, it supports the fact that forcing a walled garden is needed or desirable.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way. Reddit has become about rapid-fire content consumption without leaving the site. Following a link and actually reading an article for 5-10 minutes isn’t as exciting as rapidly consuming a few videos, a few screenshots, and a few self posts along with the top comments for the most interesting ones. Even on HN it’s common to read comments where the author obviously hasn’t bothered to read the linked article. Many people are more interested in the social and discussion aspects of these sites than being redirected somewhere to read an article for several minutes straight.
- starfallg 5y ago
  That's accurate more or less. Reddit has become IRC with retention. The value is in the interaction, not the aggregation, at least not anymore.
- ziml77 5y ago
  When was it not about that? The content that got the most attention was always things that were easy to consume. Images with a small amount of text slapped on top were dominant when I frequented Reddit 10 years ago. The only way you could escape that was a well moderated subreddit that enforced quality content.
- neutronicus 5y ago
  Yeah, my wife scrolls /r/all, expands posts (some of them text posts), and closes them, possibly clicking into the comments to discuss. If, at any point, she accidentally follows a link, it really pisses her off It's nice to have videos, images, and short articles in a familiar layout I know I'm much more likely to click a recipe link if it's a self-post, because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story
  - konschubert 5y ago
    > because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story Thank SEO for that.
RileyJames 5y ago
Maybe a coincidence, but my completely non-technical sister called me this week to pitch her ‘app idea’ (feature) “screenshots should have the link embedded in it”. And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android). And ultimately that’s sad, because it should 1. Be possible to implement and 2. Should already have been implemented by the platforms. Last week I struggled to send an Austin powers gif via signal. Because searching via images on google & ddg forced me to a website (wouldn’t just give me the result) and then those websites did everything possible to NOT give me a gif. I’m disappointed that this has become the reality of the internet, and I think many people on this site are in the same boat.
- JoakimOA 5y ago
  I created a bare-bones Firefox extension that does this but for copied text. It just appends the website URL and title to the end of the copied selection and uses Alt+Shift+C to trigger the extension. I like saving stuff as plain text, and when stumbling upon an old quote or code snippet that I've saved it increases the chance that there is some context as to where it came from. Here's a link to the addon, maybe someone here finds it useful. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-with-context/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-with-con...
- archduck 5y ago
  Bing's image search still lets you view the image or copy the image url directly from the search result.
- tvprod1203 5y ago
  > And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android). PDFs with embedded bitmaps can actually do that (and are currently supported widely, but PDFs are a terrible format with way too much attack surface). Same for any other composite html+whatever formats like epub. Standardizing a non-book format name and a spec that mandates nothing more than bare xhtml & image support with no JS or CSS interpreters would probably be quite sufficient. > duckduckgo Duckduckgo caches/proxies the images on its desktop site, which is useful when it gives results for sites that are since dead. Often at a lower resolution, but that's what reverse image searching is for.
oarsinsync 5y ago
> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? For the sender, especially on mobile, it takes less time to take and share a screenshot, then it takes to get the URL, copy it and paste it into a message. For the receiver, it takes less time to receive and view a screenshot then it takes to recieve and open a link. Web page rendering times suck, so the people have found a solution to work around that. I much prefer to receive a screenshot of what someone wants me to see, than a link. I can view picture messages much more quickly than I can view links, and I often wont click a link because I don't want to sit there waiting for a page to finish rendering. It's either slow because it's full of adverts, or it's slow because it's stalling waiting for an advert/tracker to load that's blocked by the pihole.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  For years I've been wishing for a kind of screenshot that included more than just pixel values. Like if it made a little pdf of the region you chose that rendered without fuss or external resources. There's no technical reason we couldn't have the convenience of screenshots, but also copyable text, clickable links etc.
- pimlottc 5y ago
  Links sharing is also less predictable. What will the shared message look like? Will it contain useful context like the page title or will it be a giant unreadable URL? Will there be a link preview? Depends on the messaging platform (SMS and Signal no, iMessage and Slack yes). Will it even take the user to the same page? Will there be a paywall or a redirect to an infinite scroll? A screenshot is truly WYSIWYG and is the most reliable way to know that they will see the exact same thing that you see.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
The problem that Reddit's native vid/img upload solved was how every Reddit thread older than a year was a 404 link to imgur, a Youtube video since made private, etc. It's essential to avoid link rot. Not long ago, old Reddit content was almost always dead. As usual, it's just trade-offs.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Shouldn’t the creators of the original content have a say though? If someone made their youtube video private that probably means they don’t want people watching it anymore.
  - analognoise 5y ago
    If that was a consideration, wouldn't they have hosted it themselves? Even super small businesses that rely on training videos as paid income don't host things on YouTube because they want more control over the content.
    - mnowicki 5y ago
      it's likely the video creator used youtube so they could create an audience much more easily. Or didn't have the technical know-how to host a video themselves. Or they didn't expect making their youtube video private in the future would be an issue, or any number of reasons. It's much harder to imagine someone wanting to upload videos to youtube, and then considering the possibility that something might change in the future that makes them want to make their videos private, and then deciding they are going to host the video on their own instead. Unless it's a tech person or someone making extremely shady videos, this scenario is much more unlikely than the opposite
OwlsParlay 5y ago
Taking a screenshot on your phone is far easier than finding where Share is in your current browser. Sharing is a mess.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Right-click being disabled in apps is one reason. Right-clicking being kinda hard to do on mobile is another. Also, oftentimes now a link directly copied from Google links to an Amp page on Google dotcom. And even web pages try to disable right clicking. I hate it. Most apps don’t need to be apps. An actual regular website is so great. And if you can, just a static page is the best as far as accessibility and usability and linkability…
  - 542354234235 5y ago
    Also, the link will usually contain a bunch of tracking info which at best, makes it an annoyingly long mess, and at worst, makes it unclickable in whatever app the other person is using because it miss detects where the end of the link is.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  I've in the past used chrome and Firefox on mobile and Share has never been a mess
pototo666 5y ago
Interesting point, I am making a reddit clone in China. My MVP would like the very first verion of Reddit: only link sharing, no self-post or comment. Fundamentally Reddit is not a link aggregator but a content aggregator. Link is one way to reach those contents. It is simple and scalable. But content consumers would always prefer first party content, ceteris paribus. One link away is one MORE step away. Faster solution always wins.
rchaud 5y ago
Subreddit moderators prefer first-party content instead of links, because all people do is fill subreddits with affiliate links or blogspam. Mods don't want to handle this, so they discourage external links completely. In a lot of cases, a link will be posted, but the majority of the article text will be included in a message. So users can have a discussion without even visiting the page.
- Vuska 5y ago
  I mod a programming subreddit. 99% of our submissions are screenshots. It drives me mad. I tried to enforce pastebin / text posts only a few years ago and the community was firmly against it, so I let it go. We even have volunteer transcribers (thank you /r/TranscribersOfReddit) who transcribe the majority of posts. The modern internet truly is a weird place.
  - ukyrgf 5y ago
    I used to mod what is now a huge subreddit, and when I started it I made strict no memes/images/blogspam. It was lovely for a few years but then when it became big enough to become a default Reddit basically said you can't do that anymore. Now I see it commonly referred to as one of the most toxic subreddits on the site...
  - toomanybeersies 5y ago
    I wonder what the aggregate cost of text-only screenshots is. Not so much the lack of accessibility and discoverability (which are probably the biggest costs), but the energy wasted from the extra CPU cycles, the extra storage space, the increased load on networks. Come to think of it, it's probably minuscule compared to cryptocurrencies...
ronnier 5y ago
I share screenshots and raw videos, images with friends to avoid sending any traffic to Reddit, Twitter, etc. I’ve written a little service I run locally that allows me to “one tap” download videos right to my camera roll on my iPhone to make getting the raw videos as painless as possible.
Ajedi32 5y ago
> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I've noticed this as well. I wonder if this is a desire path indicating the need for a universal "share" button on mobile? Or maybe it's a consequence of people becoming used to sharing real-life experiences by taking and sending a picture?
Robotbeat 5y ago
Yeah, I think app creators (including the big guys) have obfuscated url sharing so much that it’s less usable than just doing a screenshot and uploading that.
jbluepolarbear 5y ago
I have stopped using Reddit for this reason. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure the communities forcing Reddit video/images are mods paid by Reddit. I used to get traffic to some of my old sites from Reddit, but then I kept finding my vids & content uploaded to Reddit and I wasn’t getting credit and lost almost all the traffic to my sites. Those sites were run exclusively from ad revenue from people visiting my content. Reddit stole my content and I had to shut down my sites because they no longer made enough money to pay for domain and hosting. I’ll point out, I wasn’t making much from my sites. $50 was a good month.
sathackr 5y ago
Have you recently tried to share a link with someone? There's so much tracking shit appended onto the end of the link that by the time they get it and whatever url parsing algorithm their device uses maims it, the url is no longer in tact and trying to click it brings you to a broken page. I make a concerted effort to remove all of that before sending, but Google et. al. are working very hard to make that harder and harder by continuing to make changes to obscure the link. I already have to copy it, and re-paste it into the mobile address bar just to see what the entire link looks like. The vast majority of users won't even know what parts of the url to trim, nor will they care enough to do it. So they just send a screenshot.
- haskal 5y ago
  > and trying to click it brings you to a broken page. Can you give an example of this (with the real link to compare)? Tracking info can be added to the URL but should not break the page. There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try.
  - sathackr 5y ago
    It's not the tracking info that breaks it, it's that when the receiving device tries to parse the long url and figure out what part is a link and what part is just text, winds up with a broken link. I'm not able to find an immediate example but usually happens when sharing links via a format that doesn't explicitly format them as links, such as SMS As a rule I don't install any add-ons or extensions. Because a trusted extension today can become malicious tomorrow as has happened so many times.
  - 542354234235 5y ago
    >There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try. Yes, but we are talking about why the average person just sends a screenshot. Insanely long links filled with tracking data that may or may not result in a clickable link on whatever app-browser-OS they are using is the reason. There is always a workaround for people that A: understand the problem, and B: care enough to find and use the workaround. But since the average person is not likely to pick this topic to use their limited time, energy and knowledge on, they go with the easy consistent option. Whenever there is a problem and the two options are 1. have all individuals change their behavior or 2. fix the system so the better option is the easiest, the answer is always 2.
crawsome 5y ago
Reddit turning to shit is the reason why I’m commenting here today. I got on Reddit in 2009 when it reminded me of YC/HN. text only, cooler heads prevail, it’s not completely overrun by 12 year olds and Russian trolls yet.
crazygringo 5y ago
In the case of Reddit, first-party content is better in almost every way. If I can scroll through content effortlessly, then it's easy. If I have to open each link in a new browser view/tab, ugh. Embedded images on Reddit load instantly, while loading an entire Imgur page takes forever. Not to mention that linked content is often ephemeral, whereas first-party hosting ensures it always stays viewable together with the thread. So across usability, performance, and link rot, first-party content is a win in every way. And if you're interested in the content's source/attribution, it's often in the comments. Even when (often) the OP doesn't post it or doesn't even have it (because they got it elsewhere), someone else does.
- jonkoops 5y ago
  The video player is a horrible buggy mess though.
- echelon 5y ago
  And now that Reddit is attempting to capture every user they can, quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet. Not to mention the website constantly berates you to use the app. I'd sooner suffer link rot. I also don't appreciate the progression into carefully crafted doomscrolling. Content isn't so valuable that I'd sacrifice quality for quantity.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    > quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet. ...? Reddit's always been a place for memes. It's never been HN. On the other hand, there are plenty of subreddits where quality of discourse is amazing. It's really up to you, so I don't know what you're complaining about. > carefully crafted doomscrolling That's an awfully perjorative way to say infinite scroll. But again, the quality is there in subreddits if you want it. Your choice. I think it's great they're able to cater to different types of users looking for different things.
- grishka 5y ago
  I take it you haven't heard about the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension...
rakoo 5y ago
> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere I see multiple reasons: - Everyone knows how to take a screenshot, but very few people know what a URL is, why it matters and why you should use it to share content - The URL is purposefully hidden by the app to make sure other platforms can't access the content. You must use the official app, with your account, to access content.
an_opabinia 5y ago
> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. People like the psychic pleasure of browsing and collecting and making recommendations and having taste. They like buying too, but that takes place on Amazon, where that daily gratification is only $10. It’s not important that you buy the jacket.
rkalla 5y ago
> I wonder why sharing links is so unpopular... Speed... it's always speed. It's about 4 seconds faster for me to look at a screenshot to understand a friends "LOL!" than click a link, have browser load page, render page, render ADS and then I scroll down to find the picture of the dog riding a skateboard. Speed speed speed.
TheRealWatson 5y ago
> is it just that people don't know where to find the links? Speaking for my wife, she mostly browse and share stuff on her phone. It's much quicker and consistent to take a screenshot and share it than trying to discover/remember in each app what is the best way to produce a link to paste somewhere else (how many clicks to get a share link in the amazon app? how about the YT app? FB app, can you even do it?)
insulanus 5y ago
> But Reddit is moving towards first party content. I just want to point out the extent to which marketing doublespeak has infected the world. A person from the 1990s might think that this means redditors making new content. But in this case "moving towards first party content" means "copying the interesting part from your site, to my site, and making it so it can't be copied again".
- techrat 5y ago
  At this point, Reddit is just Facebook but with more restrictions and fake names.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I think its because browsers started hiding links, and apps started replacing websites. You have a generation of people that grew up without links, and many many more late adopters that didn't willingly use the internet until the 2010s. I had to help a friend send me a link to something a few days ago, he had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't know how to copy/paste on his iPhone, and didn't realize you could get the link from safari. ...in a bit of an ironic twist, the reason he needed to send me a link was because the restaurant we were at had a QR code menu, and my phone doesn't have a QR reader.
- graton 5y ago
  > my phone doesn't have a QR reader. It is possible it does. The default photo app on Android is a QR code reader, at least on Google Pixel phones. I open the photo app and then point it at the QR code. After a moment or two text appears which allows me to open the QR code link. I only realized this in the last month or two...
  - kevincox 5y ago
    Although the recognition is hit-and-miss. A dedicated QR reader will grab the QR nearly instantly as soon as it is visible to the camera.
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    I have a CAT s61, it comes with it's own camera app. I used to be able to do it with the camera app on previous phones that I broke, which is why I got a rugged phone. (also the IR camera and laser pointer.) I would just install one, but at a glance, all of the QR code apps seem like scams, and I haven't cared enough to do any research.
    - namibj 5y ago
      good-old `ZXing` ( https://github.com/zxing/zxing https://github.com/zxing/zxing ) does the job for me nicely, supports non-QR codes, and contains practically zero BS. The only downside IMO is the forcefully-narrowed scan window, which can cause complications with extremely large QR codes, as the pixels get a little blurry and decoding gets harder for the software. Edit: you can find it on Fdroid or probably on the project site/page. It's not getting updates, but why would my QR scanner need those, anyways..... also Google doesn't want it to be published anymore, iirc due to it using relatively ancient APIs.
ineptech 5y ago
Once upon a time, neat/surprising/weird/amazing sites were part of the currency of the internet. "Check out this link" was a welcome message. Sites full of links to neat stuff were really popular. You tried to fill your chat app with friends who consistently linked you to neat stuff. Now, no more. "Check out this link" is not an enticing offer, it's assigning homework. I don't know if it's because neat stuff is no longer rare and we've collectively had our fill, or because everything got so co-opted and corrupted that we go in to every new site with one wary eye watching for the dark patterns. But one way or the other, people don't share links. They share memes instead, which ask far less of us, and are much harder to monetize.
- zucked 5y ago
  The decline of welcome "Check out this link" messages is at least partly because everyone is getting the same links from the same sources at any given moment. If you found it on a surface-level subreddit, a major Instagram account, a major news site, or a big podcast chances are decent that the content in question has already been seen by a fair number of people, and to them, seeing it again has no additional value. I see this play out hundreds of times in real life where the conversations start with "Did you see...? and "I was listening to a podcast about..."
- benjaminjosephw 5y ago
  Maybe its also because good content is more frustrating to actually get to. Compared to a decade ago there's a lot more friction on a first visit to a site. All the marketing pop-ups, paywalls and surveillance consent boxes are a hassle and page load times seemed to have gotten worse. Maybe we've been gradually conditioned to avoid those frustrations unless its really worth it.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Part of it is that most links, even when the content is good, come with some amount of pain in accessing it. Cookie banners, in-line ads re-flowing the content, pop-over ads, "subscribe to my mailing list" popups, donation begging popups, long-winded articles needlessly stuffed full of SEO keywords, auto playing videos, and most websites so full of all this stuff they jank out my phone and make it heat up. I remember the web as fondly as you do. I spent hours on StumbleUpon just finding cool websites. But nowadays even if the content is just as good (it rarely is), the websites are just so bad.
ajnin 5y ago
> Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support And it fucking sucks. It consistently fails to load, or stalls even at low quality. Even replaying a video often fails despite it already being in memory. And it degrades picture and video quality much more than other sharing sites. And all that without the convenient playback controls you can usually find. I don't understand how people put up with it
- Krisando 5y ago
  I noticed it works fine when the adblocker is disabled.
nostromo 5y ago
TikTok's meteoric rise has been because it's so easy to share the content you like, including exporting content. You can easily download a video and re-host it on another platform. You can send a link to a friend and they don't need to install the app to view it. TikTok is proving that walled gardens are counterproductive and that if you want your app to go viral, it should be easy to export and share across any platform.
- jedberg 5y ago
  Are they though? Are they making enough money to be profitable? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, reddit. They all used to be just as easy to share outside the walled garden at one point. It's a constant push/pull of vitality vs profit it seems.
  - ufmace 5y ago
    I thought it was decided by the tech-sphere that TikTok was basically a bulk information-gathering operation for the CCP.
new_guy 5y ago
> Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Something like 90% of sites don't have proper meta tags that can be scraped for previews, and the ones that do you get blocked by Cloudflare if you try. Usability is non-existent.
throwaway1777 5y ago
Screenshot lives forever. Links die.

criley2 5y ago

>I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular Tracking. Most people just assume that if you share a real link to a product, fourteen different quasi-legal shady third-party advertising profile aggregators will have that saved and loaded into your AdWords rotation and ready for Alexa to Bing you with within seconds. I get that it's more complicated than that, and that E2E chat mitigates (but doesn't eliminate) advertising tracking risk, but a link is just so easy to track, and tracking is so ingrained into our digital experience, that it's just nice to share something and break the tracking while you're at it

skinnymuch 5y ago
Most people? Most people don’t know what AdWords is. Most people don’t think much of tracking if at all outside of when they are prompted about it. Or the one or two minor anecdotes they have of (sometimes coincidentally) seeing the same sort of ad on Amazon or Facebook.
- criley2 5y ago
  ?? I think you're absolutely wrong here. My boomer parents who can't setup a Smart TV and played blu-rays in standard definition for years absolutely know that Google and Amazon are tracking everything they do and have reached out to me on several occasions about reducing how much data Big Tech gets from them. I think you're totally out of touch with the general populace if you think average users don't keenly feel the spying gaze of big tech. My 92 year old grandfather moved to iOS two years ago, at age 90, to reduce how much Google got from him. Dude doesn't know a damn thing about computers, but he knows Google is spying. I think it's valid to suggest that people don't trade links to reduce spying.
  - ses1984 5y ago
    Here's my anecdote to counter your anecdote. When I try to explain stuff like this to my family members, they barely humor me. Their eyes glaze over. They think I'm crazy. My sister-in-law works in marketing so she's kind of aware of it but has made zero changes to her behavior. Other friends tell me they get more benefit than cost and accept it.
    - criley2 5y ago
      Well here's some data to counter the anecdotes: - 80%+ of Americans agree that there needs to be Data Privacy legislation controlling big tech https://epic.org/privacy/survey/ https://epic.org/privacy/survey/ - Americans are rather in favor of breaking up big tech and popular anti-trust action continues https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/1/dfp_vox_tech_polling.pdf https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/1/dfp_vox_tec... - Apple has pivoted their iPhone advertising strategy to promote privacy against Big Tech (lol) as their #1 selling point
      - avereveard 5y ago
        > This poll was conducted between April 16-April 19, 2021 among a sample of 1992 Registered Voters 80% on an online positive-assertive survey ran on population that small it's a completely bogus statistic. heck I can't even fathom how people would cite this, the methodological note is three lines, doesn't tell how the participants were selected, say votes were weighted but doesn't say the weights nor the weighted parameters; they have like 72 pages of demographics, probably a couple person for each, and say the error margin is 2%

willis936 5y ago

In the case of person-to-person: links decay but screenshots do not. A screenshot is a record that I know doesn't have any trackers and won't one day disappear. It's the information that I want to send and nothing more.

rolandog 5y ago
> It's the information that I want to send and nothing more. In some cases, it is... But I think, most times, it's the equivalent of getting something you ordered online, encased in a large blob of jello. You can look at it, but everyone is going to have a hard time interacting with it.
Arrath 5y ago
The persistence of a screenshot (or any image) depends entirely on the hosting platform, though. How many image hosts have gone down over the years, leaving niche forums with broken image links in the middle of otherwise very useful posts? Is there any guarantee that even reddit will keep around image posts uploaded to its own servers, forever?
- willis936 5y ago
  Person-to-person means not hosted by anyone. Sending a png screenshot over sms or imessage or signal, etc. means the image is bytes on a personal device. How the other person manages their data is their own business.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Fair point, I could have sworn your comment didn't say person-to-person when I first replied. I'll give you that point. Personally, I still prefer links as I find them easier to sort and categorize in my bookmark library, or indeed take screenshots of the linked content if I deem it worth of it. As it is with images, I don't really bother to sort them so I have them scattered all over. In the folder where my SMS app saves images, in the folder where whatsapp saves images, in the case of discord I rarely explicitly download and save the images outside the app, etc. Opening a link I receive opens the link in one program, my default browser, from where I can manage the link as I see fit. All these different apps have their own built in image viewers, save locations, or layers between the message and the content/image, making it much more of a hassle to manage that image as compared to a plain link.

pjc50 5y ago

> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere Spam. The target site may be spammy: lots of adverts, popup/unders, taboola "chumboxes" etc. Or, if a site can make money from inbound link traffic, there's an incentive for its owners to spam links in subreddits to drive traffic to themselves. > This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app Definitely another problem, walled gardens that you can't link into as well as out of.

ProtoAES256 5y ago
Apart from spam, scams too. Fake login pages, to the tech-illeterate are virtually indistinguishable from the real site.
rualca 5y ago
> Spam. This excuse doesn't really stick as reddit moderates content both by their user base but also by subreddit mods and reddit admins. I'd say that this is all to do with the goal of turning reddit into a walled garden.
- rchaud 5y ago
  It absolutely sticks. Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for. The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress. The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.
  - rualca 5y ago
    > Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for. Moderating a subreddit is not a job. Moderators are regular users from the community who are picked to have a say in how the community is regulated. > The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress. Good to see that you're agreeing with me, unless you believe that mods fixing a problem without resorting to a walled garden is somehow a counterexample. > The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first. You're needlessly overgeneralizing. Using an automated filter that's prone to false positives is not a problem at all, or refutes the point I made. In fact, it supports the fact that forcing a walled garden is needed or desirable.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way. Reddit has become about rapid-fire content consumption without leaving the site. Following a link and actually reading an article for 5-10 minutes isn’t as exciting as rapidly consuming a few videos, a few screenshots, and a few self posts along with the top comments for the most interesting ones. Even on HN it’s common to read comments where the author obviously hasn’t bothered to read the linked article. Many people are more interested in the social and discussion aspects of these sites than being redirected somewhere to read an article for several minutes straight.

starfallg 5y ago
That's accurate more or less. Reddit has become IRC with retention. The value is in the interaction, not the aggregation, at least not anymore.
ziml77 5y ago
When was it not about that? The content that got the most attention was always things that were easy to consume. Images with a small amount of text slapped on top were dominant when I frequented Reddit 10 years ago. The only way you could escape that was a well moderated subreddit that enforced quality content.
neutronicus 5y ago
Yeah, my wife scrolls /r/all, expands posts (some of them text posts), and closes them, possibly clicking into the comments to discuss. If, at any point, she accidentally follows a link, it really pisses her off It's nice to have videos, images, and short articles in a familiar layout I know I'm much more likely to click a recipe link if it's a self-post, because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story
- konschubert 5y ago
  > because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story Thank SEO for that.

RileyJames 5y ago

Maybe a coincidence, but my completely non-technical sister called me this week to pitch her ‘app idea’ (feature) “screenshots should have the link embedded in it”. And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android). And ultimately that’s sad, because it should 1. Be possible to implement and 2. Should already have been implemented by the platforms. Last week I struggled to send an Austin powers gif via signal. Because searching via images on google & ddg forced me to a website (wouldn’t just give me the result) and then those websites did everything possible to NOT give me a gif. I’m disappointed that this has become the reality of the internet, and I think many people on this site are in the same boat.

JoakimOA 5y ago
I created a bare-bones Firefox extension that does this but for copied text. It just appends the website URL and title to the end of the copied selection and uses Alt+Shift+C to trigger the extension. I like saving stuff as plain text, and when stumbling upon an old quote or code snippet that I've saved it increases the chance that there is some context as to where it came from. Here's a link to the addon, maybe someone here finds it useful. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-with-context/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-with-con...
archduck 5y ago
Bing's image search still lets you view the image or copy the image url directly from the search result.
tvprod1203 5y ago
> And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android). PDFs with embedded bitmaps can actually do that (and are currently supported widely, but PDFs are a terrible format with way too much attack surface). Same for any other composite html+whatever formats like epub. Standardizing a non-book format name and a spec that mandates nothing more than bare xhtml & image support with no JS or CSS interpreters would probably be quite sufficient. > duckduckgo Duckduckgo caches/proxies the images on its desktop site, which is useful when it gives results for sites that are since dead. Often at a lower resolution, but that's what reverse image searching is for.

oarsinsync 5y ago

> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? For the sender, especially on mobile, it takes less time to take and share a screenshot, then it takes to get the URL, copy it and paste it into a message. For the receiver, it takes less time to receive and view a screenshot then it takes to recieve and open a link. Web page rendering times suck, so the people have found a solution to work around that. I much prefer to receive a screenshot of what someone wants me to see, than a link. I can view picture messages much more quickly than I can view links, and I often wont click a link because I don't want to sit there waiting for a page to finish rendering. It's either slow because it's full of adverts, or it's slow because it's stalling waiting for an advert/tracker to load that's blocked by the pihole.

Y_Y 5y ago
For years I've been wishing for a kind of screenshot that included more than just pixel values. Like if it made a little pdf of the region you chose that rendered without fuss or external resources. There's no technical reason we couldn't have the convenience of screenshots, but also copyable text, clickable links etc.
pimlottc 5y ago
Links sharing is also less predictable. What will the shared message look like? Will it contain useful context like the page title or will it be a giant unreadable URL? Will there be a link preview? Depends on the messaging platform (SMS and Signal no, iMessage and Slack yes). Will it even take the user to the same page? Will there be a paywall or a redirect to an infinite scroll? A screenshot is truly WYSIWYG and is the most reliable way to know that they will see the exact same thing that you see.

hombre_fatal 5y ago

The problem that Reddit's native vid/img upload solved was how every Reddit thread older than a year was a 404 link to imgur, a Youtube video since made private, etc. It's essential to avoid link rot. Not long ago, old Reddit content was almost always dead. As usual, it's just trade-offs.

elliekelly 5y ago
Shouldn’t the creators of the original content have a say though? If someone made their youtube video private that probably means they don’t want people watching it anymore.
- analognoise 5y ago
  If that was a consideration, wouldn't they have hosted it themselves? Even super small businesses that rely on training videos as paid income don't host things on YouTube because they want more control over the content.
  - mnowicki 5y ago
    it's likely the video creator used youtube so they could create an audience much more easily. Or didn't have the technical know-how to host a video themselves. Or they didn't expect making their youtube video private in the future would be an issue, or any number of reasons. It's much harder to imagine someone wanting to upload videos to youtube, and then considering the possibility that something might change in the future that makes them want to make their videos private, and then deciding they are going to host the video on their own instead. Unless it's a tech person or someone making extremely shady videos, this scenario is much more unlikely than the opposite

OwlsParlay 5y ago

Taking a screenshot on your phone is far easier than finding where Share is in your current browser. Sharing is a mess.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Right-click being disabled in apps is one reason. Right-clicking being kinda hard to do on mobile is another. Also, oftentimes now a link directly copied from Google links to an Amp page on Google dotcom. And even web pages try to disable right clicking. I hate it. Most apps don’t need to be apps. An actual regular website is so great. And if you can, just a static page is the best as far as accessibility and usability and linkability…
- 542354234235 5y ago
  Also, the link will usually contain a bunch of tracking info which at best, makes it an annoyingly long mess, and at worst, makes it unclickable in whatever app the other person is using because it miss detects where the end of the link is.
TchoBeer 5y ago
I've in the past used chrome and Firefox on mobile and Share has never been a mess

pototo666 5y ago

Interesting point, I am making a reddit clone in China. My MVP would like the very first verion of Reddit: only link sharing, no self-post or comment. Fundamentally Reddit is not a link aggregator but a content aggregator. Link is one way to reach those contents. It is simple and scalable. But content consumers would always prefer first party content, ceteris paribus. One link away is one MORE step away. Faster solution always wins.

rchaud 5y ago

Subreddit moderators prefer first-party content instead of links, because all people do is fill subreddits with affiliate links or blogspam. Mods don't want to handle this, so they discourage external links completely. In a lot of cases, a link will be posted, but the majority of the article text will be included in a message. So users can have a discussion without even visiting the page.

Vuska 5y ago
I mod a programming subreddit. 99% of our submissions are screenshots. It drives me mad. I tried to enforce pastebin / text posts only a few years ago and the community was firmly against it, so I let it go. We even have volunteer transcribers (thank you /r/TranscribersOfReddit) who transcribe the majority of posts. The modern internet truly is a weird place.
- ukyrgf 5y ago
  I used to mod what is now a huge subreddit, and when I started it I made strict no memes/images/blogspam. It was lovely for a few years but then when it became big enough to become a default Reddit basically said you can't do that anymore. Now I see it commonly referred to as one of the most toxic subreddits on the site...
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  I wonder what the aggregate cost of text-only screenshots is. Not so much the lack of accessibility and discoverability (which are probably the biggest costs), but the energy wasted from the extra CPU cycles, the extra storage space, the increased load on networks. Come to think of it, it's probably minuscule compared to cryptocurrencies...

ronnier 5y ago

I share screenshots and raw videos, images with friends to avoid sending any traffic to Reddit, Twitter, etc. I’ve written a little service I run locally that allows me to “one tap” download videos right to my camera roll on my iPhone to make getting the raw videos as painless as possible.

Ajedi32 5y ago

> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I've noticed this as well. I wonder if this is a desire path indicating the need for a universal "share" button on mobile? Or maybe it's a consequence of people becoming used to sharing real-life experiences by taking and sending a picture?

Robotbeat 5y ago

Yeah, I think app creators (including the big guys) have obfuscated url sharing so much that it’s less usable than just doing a screenshot and uploading that.

jbluepolarbear 5y ago

I have stopped using Reddit for this reason. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure the communities forcing Reddit video/images are mods paid by Reddit. I used to get traffic to some of my old sites from Reddit, but then I kept finding my vids & content uploaded to Reddit and I wasn’t getting credit and lost almost all the traffic to my sites. Those sites were run exclusively from ad revenue from people visiting my content. Reddit stole my content and I had to shut down my sites because they no longer made enough money to pay for domain and hosting. I’ll point out, I wasn’t making much from my sites. $50 was a good month.

sathackr 5y ago

Have you recently tried to share a link with someone? There's so much tracking shit appended onto the end of the link that by the time they get it and whatever url parsing algorithm their device uses maims it, the url is no longer in tact and trying to click it brings you to a broken page. I make a concerted effort to remove all of that before sending, but Google et. al. are working very hard to make that harder and harder by continuing to make changes to obscure the link. I already have to copy it, and re-paste it into the mobile address bar just to see what the entire link looks like. The vast majority of users won't even know what parts of the url to trim, nor will they care enough to do it. So they just send a screenshot.

haskal 5y ago
> and trying to click it brings you to a broken page. Can you give an example of this (with the real link to compare)? Tracking info can be added to the URL but should not break the page. There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try.
- sathackr 5y ago
  It's not the tracking info that breaks it, it's that when the receiving device tries to parse the long url and figure out what part is a link and what part is just text, winds up with a broken link. I'm not able to find an immediate example but usually happens when sharing links via a format that doesn't explicitly format them as links, such as SMS As a rule I don't install any add-ons or extensions. Because a trusted extension today can become malicious tomorrow as has happened so many times.
- 542354234235 5y ago
  >There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try. Yes, but we are talking about why the average person just sends a screenshot. Insanely long links filled with tracking data that may or may not result in a clickable link on whatever app-browser-OS they are using is the reason. There is always a workaround for people that A: understand the problem, and B: care enough to find and use the workaround. But since the average person is not likely to pick this topic to use their limited time, energy and knowledge on, they go with the easy consistent option. Whenever there is a problem and the two options are 1. have all individuals change their behavior or 2. fix the system so the better option is the easiest, the answer is always 2.

crawsome 5y ago

Reddit turning to shit is the reason why I’m commenting here today. I got on Reddit in 2009 when it reminded me of YC/HN. text only, cooler heads prevail, it’s not completely overrun by 12 year olds and Russian trolls yet.

crazygringo 5y ago

In the case of Reddit, first-party content is better in almost every way. If I can scroll through content effortlessly, then it's easy. If I have to open each link in a new browser view/tab, ugh. Embedded images on Reddit load instantly, while loading an entire Imgur page takes forever. Not to mention that linked content is often ephemeral, whereas first-party hosting ensures it always stays viewable together with the thread. So across usability, performance, and link rot, first-party content is a win in every way. And if you're interested in the content's source/attribution, it's often in the comments. Even when (often) the OP doesn't post it or doesn't even have it (because they got it elsewhere), someone else does.

jonkoops 5y ago
The video player is a horrible buggy mess though.
echelon 5y ago
And now that Reddit is attempting to capture every user they can, quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet. Not to mention the website constantly berates you to use the app. I'd sooner suffer link rot. I also don't appreciate the progression into carefully crafted doomscrolling. Content isn't so valuable that I'd sacrifice quality for quantity.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  > quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet. ...? Reddit's always been a place for memes. It's never been HN. On the other hand, there are plenty of subreddits where quality of discourse is amazing. It's really up to you, so I don't know what you're complaining about. > carefully crafted doomscrolling That's an awfully perjorative way to say infinite scroll. But again, the quality is there in subreddits if you want it. Your choice. I think it's great they're able to cater to different types of users looking for different things.
grishka 5y ago
I take it you haven't heard about the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension...

rakoo 5y ago

> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere I see multiple reasons: - Everyone knows how to take a screenshot, but very few people know what a URL is, why it matters and why you should use it to share content - The URL is purposefully hidden by the app to make sure other platforms can't access the content. You must use the official app, with your account, to access content.

an_opabinia 5y ago

> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. People like the psychic pleasure of browsing and collecting and making recommendations and having taste. They like buying too, but that takes place on Amazon, where that daily gratification is only $10. It’s not important that you buy the jacket.

rkalla 5y ago

> I wonder why sharing links is so unpopular... Speed... it's always speed. It's about 4 seconds faster for me to look at a screenshot to understand a friends "LOL!" than click a link, have browser load page, render page, render ADS and then I scroll down to find the picture of the dog riding a skateboard. Speed speed speed.

TheRealWatson 5y ago

> is it just that people don't know where to find the links? Speaking for my wife, she mostly browse and share stuff on her phone. It's much quicker and consistent to take a screenshot and share it than trying to discover/remember in each app what is the best way to produce a link to paste somewhere else (how many clicks to get a share link in the amazon app? how about the YT app? FB app, can you even do it?)

insulanus 5y ago

> But Reddit is moving towards first party content. I just want to point out the extent to which marketing doublespeak has infected the world. A person from the 1990s might think that this means redditors making new content. But in this case "moving towards first party content" means "copying the interesting part from your site, to my site, and making it so it can't be copied again".

techrat 5y ago
At this point, Reddit is just Facebook but with more restrictions and fake names.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

I think its because browsers started hiding links, and apps started replacing websites. You have a generation of people that grew up without links, and many many more late adopters that didn't willingly use the internet until the 2010s. I had to help a friend send me a link to something a few days ago, he had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't know how to copy/paste on his iPhone, and didn't realize you could get the link from safari. ...in a bit of an ironic twist, the reason he needed to send me a link was because the restaurant we were at had a QR code menu, and my phone doesn't have a QR reader.

graton 5y ago
> my phone doesn't have a QR reader. It is possible it does. The default photo app on Android is a QR code reader, at least on Google Pixel phones. I open the photo app and then point it at the QR code. After a moment or two text appears which allows me to open the QR code link. I only realized this in the last month or two...
- kevincox 5y ago
  Although the recognition is hit-and-miss. A dedicated QR reader will grab the QR nearly instantly as soon as it is visible to the camera.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  I have a CAT s61, it comes with it's own camera app. I used to be able to do it with the camera app on previous phones that I broke, which is why I got a rugged phone. (also the IR camera and laser pointer.) I would just install one, but at a glance, all of the QR code apps seem like scams, and I haven't cared enough to do any research.
  - namibj 5y ago
    good-old `ZXing` ( https://github.com/zxing/zxing https://github.com/zxing/zxing ) does the job for me nicely, supports non-QR codes, and contains practically zero BS. The only downside IMO is the forcefully-narrowed scan window, which can cause complications with extremely large QR codes, as the pixels get a little blurry and decoding gets harder for the software. Edit: you can find it on Fdroid or probably on the project site/page. It's not getting updates, but why would my QR scanner need those, anyways..... also Google doesn't want it to be published anymore, iirc due to it using relatively ancient APIs.

ineptech 5y ago

Once upon a time, neat/surprising/weird/amazing sites were part of the currency of the internet. "Check out this link" was a welcome message. Sites full of links to neat stuff were really popular. You tried to fill your chat app with friends who consistently linked you to neat stuff. Now, no more. "Check out this link" is not an enticing offer, it's assigning homework. I don't know if it's because neat stuff is no longer rare and we've collectively had our fill, or because everything got so co-opted and corrupted that we go in to every new site with one wary eye watching for the dark patterns. But one way or the other, people don't share links. They share memes instead, which ask far less of us, and are much harder to monetize.

zucked 5y ago
The decline of welcome "Check out this link" messages is at least partly because everyone is getting the same links from the same sources at any given moment. If you found it on a surface-level subreddit, a major Instagram account, a major news site, or a big podcast chances are decent that the content in question has already been seen by a fair number of people, and to them, seeing it again has no additional value. I see this play out hundreds of times in real life where the conversations start with "Did you see...? and "I was listening to a podcast about..."
benjaminjosephw 5y ago
Maybe its also because good content is more frustrating to actually get to. Compared to a decade ago there's a lot more friction on a first visit to a site. All the marketing pop-ups, paywalls and surveillance consent boxes are a hassle and page load times seemed to have gotten worse. Maybe we've been gradually conditioned to avoid those frustrations unless its really worth it.
mdoms 5y ago
Part of it is that most links, even when the content is good, come with some amount of pain in accessing it. Cookie banners, in-line ads re-flowing the content, pop-over ads, "subscribe to my mailing list" popups, donation begging popups, long-winded articles needlessly stuffed full of SEO keywords, auto playing videos, and most websites so full of all this stuff they jank out my phone and make it heat up. I remember the web as fondly as you do. I spent hours on StumbleUpon just finding cool websites. But nowadays even if the content is just as good (it rarely is), the websites are just so bad.

ajnin 5y ago

> Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support And it fucking sucks. It consistently fails to load, or stalls even at low quality. Even replaying a video often fails despite it already being in memory. And it degrades picture and video quality much more than other sharing sites. And all that without the convenient playback controls you can usually find. I don't understand how people put up with it

Krisando 5y ago
I noticed it works fine when the adblocker is disabled.

nostromo 5y ago

TikTok's meteoric rise has been because it's so easy to share the content you like, including exporting content. You can easily download a video and re-host it on another platform. You can send a link to a friend and they don't need to install the app to view it. TikTok is proving that walled gardens are counterproductive and that if you want your app to go viral, it should be easy to export and share across any platform.

jedberg 5y ago
Are they though? Are they making enough money to be profitable? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, reddit. They all used to be just as easy to share outside the walled garden at one point. It's a constant push/pull of vitality vs profit it seems.
- ufmace 5y ago
  I thought it was decided by the tech-sphere that TikTok was basically a bulk information-gathering operation for the CCP.

new_guy 5y ago

> Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Something like 90% of sites don't have proper meta tags that can be scraped for previews, and the ones that do you get blocked by Cloudflare if you try. Usability is non-existent.

throwaway1777 5y ago

Screenshot lives forever. Links die.